Hackaday Links: December 3, 2011

Honey, would you like some cheese? WHIRRRRRRRRR

[The Timmy] broke his manual cheese grater. It would be a waste to throw away a perfectly functional tool that’s only missing a handle, so he kicked it up a notch with a cordless drill. Now [Tim], “can grate with incredible speed and power for even the toughest of cheeses.” Anyone have a broken pepper mill?

The most adorable oscilloscope

We’re not much for plugging products, but this scope is really cool. It’s designed to fit on a breadboard and is smaller than some ICs we’ve seen (68000, so yes, it is). We’re wondering why there hasn’t been a homebrew version of this yet.

Now do an R/C castle

Here’s a minifig-sized R/C LEGO car made by [brickmodder]. It has a custom drive train and steering mechanism that uses the smallest servos [brickmodder] could find. How about an R/C pirate ship next?

It’s probably an ad for something

Inverting an inverter

[Manfred] is putting an alternative energy setup on his land. Of course he needed an inverter to charge his batteries, so he went with a highly regarded (high price) box. What he got was anything but. You’re going to need at least ten minutes to go through this hilariously sad teardown of a high quality Taiwanese inverter. Oh, [Manfred] is awesome. Just look at his microhydro plant.

I have that scope, it’s the Xprotolab. I have been able to do the majority of my lab assignments with it at home, as part of my college course. It is not a replacement for a full-sized scope, but for students and home experimenters, I honestly believe it is just the thing to get. The price is right, too. And the new version of firmware (mine’s old) supports a USB connection and there is software to view the output like a real scope. Pretty damned good.

I looked at that secret code yesterday. It disassembles to valid X86 machine code. It even has a Linux syscall in there. Looks like the RC4 crypto algorithm. Part of it is missing on the end though. I still have no idea what the keyword is though.

also i was bored and i thought i was going to find the answer hidden within the webpage code or some ssh open back door that leads to the answer or a script left for others to find, but google? thats kinda low ;p
Valve makes better puzzles.

I remember a code cracker thingy like that in a Bruce Willis movie. The premise was that anybody who could crack the code was judged as a National Security risk by some obscure Bureaucrats, and needed to disappear. Of course, Bruce’s job was to protect the “savant” who broke the code, and take down the bad guys in a “Man Movie” sort of way…

Regarding the itty-bitty-teeny-weenie O’Scope, unless you REALLY need a scope that plugs into a protoboard, SeeedStudios is selling one that is faster (1MHz analog bandwidth instead of 200KHz), frequency counter (digital only), bigger display with more pixels, bezel and labelled front panel with buttons, screen captures saved to EEPROM, and it costs less ($48 instead of $49).

The downside is only one analog input, no spectrum analyzer, no analog waveform out, and no protocol sniffer.

So, depending on your needs, they are both inexpensive and useful items.

There can be problems getting a government permit to divert water (even on your own property) in the USA due to an abundance of environmental legislation. It can help a lot to donate large campaign contributions elected official who may be able to help you. Money can buy you additional freedoms if you can afford to “grease the wheels”, so to speak.

Happened in reverse for me: I got impatient with my pepper grinder, and attached the drill for some peppercorn steak. I got the steak, but the pepper grinder didn’t make it. I had a great time, the wife wasn’t so impressed, though.